Social Action & Science

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ChaplaincyA visionary and comprehensive two-year program for a new kind of chaplaincy to serve individuals, communities, the environment, and the world.

The Way of All Things: Exploration of Writing, Nature and Love

Instructors:
Natalie Goldberg * Wendy Johnson

Description:

People who are active and creative must have quiet peace at their back; otherwise, they burn up. This retreat offers the opportunity to develop the active mind of writing with the contemplative atmospere of silence, sitting and walking. This retreat is designed to place us solidly in our own experience, develop a strong writing spine at the same time as expanding our tenderness toward existence. Folded in to the writing will be an exploration of memoir, how we remember and how the present moment is, oddly enough, where the past that carries memory can be found.

Plan to spend half of each day in silence, to do short meditations and one-foot-after-the -other slow walking in the garden. In addition, we will do a lot of timed writings in class and deep listening --to yourself and others--in small and large groups.
Please click here for the required reading list and more general information.
We encourage early registration, particularly, if you plan to lodge at Upaya which fills quickly. We have made arrangements with local hotels to handle your housing needs. Contact registrar@upaya.org for lodging information.

More about the instructors:

Natalie Goldberg is the author of fourteen books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has sold over one million copies and has been translated into fourteen languages. She has also written the beloved Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, a memoir about her Zen teacher. For the last forty years she has practiced Zen and taught seminars in writing as a spiritual practice. She lives in northern New Mexico. For more information about Natalie and her programs and writings, click here.

Wendy Johnsonis a Buddhist meditation teacher and organic gardening mentor who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Wendy has been practicing Zen meditation for thirty-five years and has led meditation retreats nationwide since 1992 as an ordained lay dharma teacher in the traditions of Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and the San Francisco Zen Center. Wendy is one of the founders of the organic Farm and Garden Program at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, where she lived with her family from 1975 to 2000. She has been teaching gardening and environmental education to the public since the early 1980s.

In 2000 Wendy and her husband, Peter Rudnick, received the annual Sustainable Agriculture Award from the National Ecological Farming Association. Since 1995 Wendy has written a quarterly column, “On Gardening,” for Tricycle Magazine, a Buddhist Review. She was honored in The Best Science and Nature Writing 2000, published by Houghton Mifflin. Wendy is a mentor and advisor to the Edible Schoolyard program of the Chez Panisse Foundation, a project that she has been involved in since in its inception in 1995. This is her first book.